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Blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, even official documentsÂ and emails are at risk of being lost forever because the programs needed to view them in are becoming defunct with every upgrade.

Vint Cerf, Googleâ€™s vice-president has warned that our first steps into the digital world could be lost forever into whatÂ is essentially a digital ‘black hole’.

â€śWhen you think about the quantity of documentation from our daily lives that is captured in digital form, like our interactions by email, peopleâ€™s tweets, and all of the world wide web, itâ€™s clear that we stand to lose an awful lot of our history,â€ť Cerf told reporters.

â€śWe donâ€™t want our digital lives to fade away. If we want to preserve them, we need to make sure that the digital objects we create today can still be rendered far into the future,â€ť he added.

CerfÂ in an address to the American Association for the Advancement of Scienceâ€™s annual meeting in San Jose, California, warned of a â€śforgotten generation, or even a forgotten centuryâ€ť due to what he coined â€śbit rotâ€ť, where older computer files and programs become useless.

â€śWe are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we donâ€™t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised,â€ť Cerf told the Guardian. â€śIf there are photos you really care about, print them out.â€ť

His warning underpins the irony at the heart of our digital world, where precious moments, photos, letters and other documents are digitised in the hope of ensuring the long term survival.

Yet while progress is being made in storing digital files for centuries to come, the programs and software needed to make sense of the files is continually falling out of use.

Coupled with the issue of inventing new technology to copy and store such files is the issue of legal permissions. If technology or IT companies go out of business and stop supporting their products, they may sell the rights to their products making it a nightmare to try and obtain them later on.

â€śTo do this properly, the rights of preservation might need to be incorporated into our thinking about things like copyright and patents and licensing. Weâ€™re talking about preserving them for hundreds to thousands of years,â€ť said Cerf.

Believe it or not, they are extendable rods manufactures to enable smartphone users to remotely trigger their phone to take a picture.

Selfie sticks are widely popular in Korea and with tourists as they enable the perfect shot every time.

You see the trouble is that human arms aren’t quite long enough to get you and that famous landmark, tourist attraction or background in shot.

The product first debuted on the market in February this year. First used by extreme sports aficionados the stick’s use has exploded primarily in east and Southeast Asia.

But the selfie stick is expected to go global thanks to its inexpensive parts and an inexhaustible appetite for selfies or self portraits from a better vantage point than ‘humanly’ possible.

Now a controversial move by the South Korean government threatens to ruin all that.

They are concerned that contraband versions of the selfie sticks will disrupt other vital electronic devices, such as medical equipment using the same radio frequencies.

According to the Wireless Telegraphy Act, which came into force on november 21, it is a violation to sell, manufacture or import communication devices without authentication.

Violators face a fine of up to $30,000 or a maximum prison sentence of three years.

But critics say the governments fears were unfounded.

“No matter how many people press the button at the same time, it’s not sufficient to interfere with other devices’ network or cause interference in frequencies in unlicensed bandwidth,” says wireless systems researcher Kim Chung-ki, from Korea University.